Mark Berman

If you feel like you have to be looking over your shoulder, we don't think it's going to be restorative.

So the kind of nature experiences that we've been talking about are the kinds of natural experiences where you feel safe, you can let your mind wander, you don't have to be so vigilant.

I think what I'm saying is that

Nature is very important and we need to figure out ways to incorporate more nature into our lives, even if those lives are in a very kind of urban environment.

That's another powerful story by Kay Bird, and it reminds me of some research that my mentors, Steve and Rachel Kaplan, did where they were looking at people who are gardeners

and looking to see how gardening could also be beneficial for people.

And what they noticed was that some gardeners used pesticides and different kinds of fertilizer in their garden, and other gardeners kind of just did it more organically and just kind of let nature run its course.

And Steve used to tell me that it seemed like there was more benefits for the gardeners who are gardening without the pesticides and the fertilizers that were just letting nature take its course compared to the gardeners who are gardening with fertilizers and pesticides.

And why he thought that was the case was because when you're letting nature just take its course,

you're not so tied to everything, but if you're trying to exert so much control over that natural environment, if a plant dies or something doesn't grow accordingly the way you like, it's gonna be distressing.

But if you can just kind of,

take that level of control away and just say, you know, I'm just going to let it go the way it's going to go, it's sort of freeing.

And that kind of reminds me of Katie Bird's experience.

She didn't have any control of the rain coming.

The rain came, it was uncomfortable, and she just kind of succumbed to it.

Then she kind of got this reward.

And again, being in nature can kind of just help us to accept that we're not always in control and that things aren't always going to work out.

But that's part of life and that's part of nature.

The building facades and building interiors had no overt nature to them, but some of the buildings had more curved edges to them.

Like you can imagine a building by Gaudi in Barcelona that has a lot of curved edges